Fans of Richard’s posts should watch the video in this article from The Atlantic. Nice explainer on the difference between survival and mortality rates. You can cut through a decent bit of healthcare policy bullshit if you know the difference between the two.

Totally OT, but the game of thrones thread down a bit has me jonesing for a hit… any chance you could make a post in all “Hodors”? Either that or google needs to code a translator for English to Hodor. Even better if they can do Hodor to English.

That’s what I thought when I heard the name too. Who knows. That segment with Peter Guralnick talking about Elvis was awesome – almost makes me want to read his two volume tome on Elvis. The anecdote about the disconnected for thirty years phone suddenly ringing while sitting in his dad Vernon’s office, well that was very very cool.

@schrodinger’s cat: How complicated is your Word document, and how long? If you don’t have a huge amount of formatting or equations or anything like that, copying the text out of Word and into a regular text editor, and adding in the small amount of LaTeX markup might be the easiest.

The times I’ve done that conversion it’s all been by hand. I’d usually copy/paste a couple of paragraphs at a time, and then go through and manually put in the bold/italics and BibTeX codes and figures and so forth. Tedious, but manageable.

But I will note, even using 5 year survival rates for common cancers, or heart attack or stroke, it is not true that the US ‘dominates’ or ‘is the best in the world’ across the board compared to other high income industrialized countries. So, even giving him a pass for using the wrong measure, Rudy was still wrong about the U.S. health care system.

@dmsilev: Husband kitteh is trying to edit a manuscript which was in Word and convert it to LaTeX. AFAIK it has a manageable number of equations but lots of tables. Its about 50 pages or so. He is doing what you said, but it is a bit tedious to do that for 50 pages.

@schrodinger’s cat: Nope, it’s been several years since I had to do anything with LaTex. I just found this with a web search, and it had a few recommendations. I’ve used Open Office quite a bit, and it’s gotten a lot better. If it’s up to that quality, it’s probably worthwhile. Open source products vary a lot in quality, but many of them are excellent. Hopefully, this is one.

Please hurry up and post your “Rand Paul has some good ideas” post so I can laugh loudly at you. I know you want to. Are you waiting for Griftwald to blow him some wet kisses first?

This is in reference to Rand Paul saying he wants to sue the Administration over NSA data collection. I KNOW there are lots of idiots on Ball Juice who are dumb enough to fall for that political grandstanding bullshit.

Washington (CNN) — The Senate voted Wednesday to avert at least one chronic Washington political crisis for at least a year.
With a snowstorm bearing down on the capital, it approved a House-passed measure that allows the government to borrow more money to pay its bills through March 2015.
The White House signaled that President Barack Obama would sign the legislation, so the Senate vote was the last hurdle to resolving the debt-ceiling issue until after the November congressional elections.
Wednesday’s votes were a blow to tea party conservatives who oppose any kind of increase in federal borrowing.Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a leader of the GOP tea party wing, mounted a filibuster to force a 60-vote threshold for proceeding on the measure.
However, about a dozen of Republicans joined Democrats to overcome the filibuster on a 67-31 procedural vote that avoided another politically damaging legislative impasse over spending.

Investment firms are playing landlord and bundling their rental homes into new securities. What could go wrong?
By Laura Gottesdiener March/April 2014

Toward the end of 2012, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange. Home prices were starting to rise, and fast—about 20 percent annually. Normally, higher home prices would signal increased demand from homebuyers and indicate that the economy was rebounding. But the home ownership rate was still dropping. Somehow, the real estate market was out of whack.

Then there were the buyers themselves. “I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” recalls Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Latino. Now all his buyers were businessmen in suits. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.

Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in some of the cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But they’re not simply flipping these houses. Instead, they’ve started bundling some of them into a new kind of financial product that could blow up the housing market all over again.

Israeli spies have been ordered to dig up intelligence showing that supporters of an economic boycott are linked to terrorists and enemy states.
The strategy was presented at a ministerial meeting called to discuss how to respond to the growing number of foreign companies refusing to do business with Israeli entities operating in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. They are considered illegal under international law. At the meeting, Yuval Steinitz, the Minister for Intelligence and Strategy, outlined a plan for a media blitz against organisations advocating boycotts.

@ranchandsyrup: It was strategically stupid though. Thanks to Cruz, the vote ended up being 67-31, so the Democrats can now go around saying “look, bipartisan!”. If he kept his mouth shut, it would have passed on a party-line vote.

@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t know if it would work, but perhaps LyX might do the trick. It’s a WYSIWG LaTeX editor. You could do a copy and paste job, and see whether LyX got you at least close to where you needed to be. Might at least cut down on some of the work.

@dmsilev:
Gasp! How can you say such a thing?! Ted Cruz is so smart, he doesn’t even pal around with people who didn’t go to prestigious universities like he did. He’s always the smarterest person in any room!

@Amir Khalid:
Seriously, Ted Cruz is showing immense pigheadedness coupled with a serious inability to fake sensitivity towards others. I don’t see this guy making much more progress in his political career. People are going to turned off pretty quick by his jerkitude, and my guess is that he’ll stall out at this level.

Correctamundo. Folks who either see Terrible Ted as the party’s next big thing, or fear his national ambitions, seem to have never watched/listened to him speak. That’s one pig no amount of lipstick can fix.

It was strategically stupid though. Thanks to Cruz, the vote ended up being 67-31, so the Democrats can now go around saying “look, bipartisan!”. If he kept his mouth shut, it would have passed on a party-line vote.

This is all about Ted Cruz getting to pretend that he’s an Important Senator Man Who Must Be Appeased. Cruz’s schtick makes a lot more sense when you realize he cares only about his own personal political ambition AND he doesn’t believe that he needs anyone’s help to get what he wants.

I’d love to be there the day that this finally all backfires on Teddy Cruz. Hopefully by that point he will have even pissed off the Wingnut Welfare Suppliers so that they won’t hire him on at some cushy sinecure.

@Trollhattan: Faulconer is not a moderate. He’s a bought and paid for puppet of our local plutocrat that will now get to develop prime waterfront property. Such a bummer. SD is now the largest city to have an R mayor. Missed opportunity by the Ds. The plutocrat spent heavy in the primary to get the more electable D out. Alvarez (who lost) is a real progressive, but he couldn’t pull it off.

Went to a talk yesterday about our water issues with City personnel speaking. We’re good for this year due to voluntary 15% reduction. Likely mandatory restrictions. Rate hikes coming to pay for the “investments” we made but it’s really because they didn’t budget for the reduction.

@Amir Khalid: I was wrong – I did hit the paywall on the first link. And the second one.

When I googled: Israel Starts New Propaganda War To Beat Boycott

I got some links, most of which were paywalled. But not this one at Islam Times:

12 Feb 2014 11:54

Islam Times – ISRAELI spies have been ordered to dig up intelligence showing that supporters of an economic boycott are linked to terrorists and enemy states.

The strategy was presented at a ministerial meeting called to discuss how to respond to the growing number of foreign companies refusing to do business with Israeli entities operating in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. They are considered illegal under international law.

At the meeting Yuval Steinitz, the Minister for Intelligence and Strategy, outlined a plan for a media blitz against organisations advocating boycotts. His strategy includes intelligence agencies working to expose “their connection to terror organisations and enemy states”, the Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

Oxfam was accused of promoting an anti-Israeli boycott last month when it parted company with Scarlett Johansson, the Hollywood star, over her promotional work for Sodastream. The Israeli company manufactures products in a West Bank settlement. Oxfam insisted that it did not support a total economic boycott of Israel, but merely opposed trade with the settlements.

Britain also opposes a boycott, but continues to regard the settlements as illegal and not part of the state of Israel.

Brussels is to issue new rules requiring the separate labelling of Israeli goods produced in the West Bank, to allow consumers to make more informed choices.

A coalition of leading pro-peace Israeli and Palestinian business people, including Meir Brand, the CEO of Google Israel, warned last month that Israel’s economic growth would suffer if an agreement was not reached to end the West Bank occupation. “The world is beginning to lose its patience and the threat of sanctions is becoming more imminent,” the group said.

The issue of how to combat the boycott threat has divided the Israeli Government. Yair Lapid, the Finance Minister, and Tzipi Livni, the Justice Minister and chief negotiator, both leading moderates, were pointedly excluded from Sunday’s meeting despite their direct connections to the boycott issue.

@Trollhattan: The same one. Also bought up the smaller local papers that he could. Then laid off most of the staff. Also cut the healthcare to remaining employees because of Obamacare. Then tried to run his “dream” candidate for SD (a gay repub that is now running for congress) but lost to Filner.

@WaterGirl: Not really close, no. I has some sads about it. Some commenters put in a bunch of work to get a better result. I truly thank them for their time and efforts. I still think that Nathan Fletcher would have won. He isn’t nearly as progressive as Alvarez, but he’s light-years better than having Faulconer in there.
Interesting dynamics in the D party down here.

I am starting to hear that more and more often. So frustrating. The good thing is when you’ve worked your butt off for the candidate you want, at least you have no regrets that maybe if you’d worked harder then it would have gone the other way.

That’s why I was so driven to work my butt off for Obama in the primaries, starting in 2007 for Iowa and then on to Colorado and then on to Michigan, etc. I felt like i had to do everything I could to get him to the general when other people would start believing in him. It was all about no regrets. Except with a happy ending ! :-)

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